Fox Business anchor Trish Regan baselessly threw out a conspiracy theory that just happened to smear Phoenix’s Democratic mayor who had requested Donald Trump not hold his rally there Tuesday night.

In case you missed it, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton publicly asked Trump to delay his rally in light of the tensions stoked by Trump’s comments about the violence at the recent white supremacists’ rally in Charlottesville.

Predictably, Trump held the rally anyway. Although the thousands protesting were mostly peaceful, tensions escalated after Trump’s speech and the police used teargas and smoke canisters to disperse the crowd.

Regan, speaking from the studio to reporter Jeff Flock, cooked up a way to blame Trump-critic Stanton for the problems.

Almost as bad as supposedly-objective Regan’s made-up smear was her disingenuous claim that she hated doing it.

REGAN: The mayor didn’t want this rally to happen. And he had asked the president not to be there tonight. Jeff, do you think that there may be an effort on behalf of local authorities to be overly aggressive at all, in part because you know – I hate to say this, I hate to even go there but you wonder if, if they want to see this kind of commotion because it once again feeds a narrative that many on the left want to see fit.

Flock’s response made it clear he had found no evidence of anything even close to what Regan was suggesting.

FLOCK: These days – and I’m not gonna speculate on that but I would just say these days, whatever happens I’m sure those on the right will say look what happened, it turned into a riot, these violent protesters which I don’t think was the case. And those on the other side will spin it out the other way.

Regan seems to aspire to be the Sean Hannity of the Fox Business Network.

Showing 2 reactions

Something that intrigues me: the Boston event was largely peaceful yet almost 40 people were arrested. The Arizona protests were marked by a massive use of tear gas and confrontations, yet only 3 arrested. Those numbers don’t track.

I remain in total awe at the capacity of the RW commenters like this lady to twist themselves into pretzel-like art-forms, both to defend the indefensible (à la Jeffrey Lord, who would try to defend the President’s “taking a dump on the desk”) and to accuse others (Obama).